MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

• Someone asked me the other day what I did.

• Yesterday I spent a few hours setting up a new online presence for my music activities.

• This morning I glanced at the MaconMacGuy logo.

Three unrelated incidents – yet they combine into a thought about what exactly it is I do as the MaconMacGuy.

Essentially what I do is enhance a client’s online presence through a variety of means. My skillset is fairly broad, and I’m not afraid to call in help where it’s needed – but my real strength is in identifying what technologies make sense for a business to use, and then helping the business implement those things into the workflow.

Case in point – YoungAmericaMusic.com. For several years that site has been a traditional static site (which I designed and have maintained). In the last year I saw a need for YAMS to have something more dynamic – but that would still reflect the “folksy” vibe of the store. Emmett, the owner, also needed to a way to do some updates, and it needed to be baby-simple. He doesn’t have time to integrate a whole new techno-thing to his workflow – he’s got music lessons to teach!

We discussed what he needed – a way to post event announcements to 2 different groups. I setup 2 different blogs on Blogger.com, and took about 20 minutes one day and worked with him. He became comfortable with it quickly, and started adding material to both of them. Meanwhile, I added the two blogs to my Feedburner account – and setup a headline animator. It took just a few minutes to add the code to the front page – and mission accomplished, with VERY little expense to the store.

Now he has a way to add announcements to the groups – they are automatically added to the site, people can get new material automatically sent to their email, and I can track how many people are reading his missives.

As a bonus, this new feature should also increase his search engine visibility because of the search-engine-friendly dynamic content.

This type of thing is what my byline is referring to: Putting the Pieces Together. I leveraged my experience with WordPress, blogging, SEO (search engine optimization), teaching & training, HTML/PHP, plus a few other odds and ends to make this happen – and he is not only happy with the results, he is already seeing some tangible benefits to the store.

So how can I help you?

The short answer: IMPROVISE!

I just tried to give a final exam in a computer class I teach at Mercer. The final is given online using an online service we use in the class – and have all semester relatively successfully.

The class yesterday took it with a few problems, but nothing major. Today, though, was a different story.

3 of the 20-some student could access the final exam – and a 30 minute conversation with tech support resulted in the response “We don’t know what is causing your problem.” This is tech-speak for “That shouldn’t be happening, and we’d need to do some serious forensics work to figure it out – and that’s not going to happen”.

This started me thinking about what a small business needs to do when thigns blow up. In my case (a college class), I discussed with the class the options – and made a change the syllabus (not count a final exam and adjust the percentages in other areas to make up the difference) – so it wasn’t a busizes-critical thing.

But if it HAD been, what would I have done? Anyone who depends on technology has got to think about that – the biz calls it “disaster-preparedness”, but I’d call it “common sense”. You KNOW your machines are going to die, and they will do it at the WORST possible moment.

Every machine on the planet has the middle name of “Murphy”, and they follow Murphy’s law to the letter.

So make plans for your machines going down. How will YOU improvise when it happens?